finer distinctions than that.
At some point the servants turned a corner, the curtain rippled, I saw fingers, and then I saw a face peering out. I knew instantly and viscerally who she was. I might have gasped or made some noise, because she looked at me. The pose of her neck, her round, dark eyes staring out at me. It wasn’t the same face, exactly, but it was the same girl. Now she was older than I was, probably twenty-five at least.
I can’t tell you how I knew it was her. In the years since then I’ve gotten to be very good at recognizing souls from one life to the next. I find it puzzling myself, so it’s hard to explain how I do it. But I am not the only one who can. It’s not so different from the way you can know a person when she is twenty years old and recognize her again when she is eighty, though every cell in her body has changed in the meantime. There is almost nothing you could program a computer to do, by observation alone, that would allow it to recognize a person at such disparate ages. But we can do it. Animals can do it.
What is it we recognize? The soul is a mysterious thing. It’s no less mysterious for me, though I’ve seen my own and others’ refracted through hundreds of bodies over time.
One thing I can tell you from my unusual perspective is how powerfully our souls reveal themselves in our faces and bodies. Just sit on a train sometime and look at the people around you. Choose a person’s face and study it carefully. All the better if they are old and a stranger to you. Ask yourself what you know about that person, and if you open yourself to the information, you will find you know an overwhelming amount. We naturally guard ourselves from the obvious truths of strangers around us, so be warned. You can get overstimulated and uneasy if you really start to look. One of the skills of living is simplifying as you go, so when you let your guard down, the complexity is troubling. There are certain rare people you find—usually they are healers or poets or people who work with animals—who live their lives in this state, and I admire them and sympathize with them, but I am not like them anymore. I’ve done a lot of simplifying in my life.
As you look at this stranger’s face you will be able to guess pretty accurately at age, background, and social class. And as you look longer, if you let yourself see, the subtleties will clamor to show themselves. Doubts, compromises, and disappointments little and big—those usually reside around the eyes, but there are no rules. The hopes usually lurk around the mouth, but so do bitterness and tenacity. A sense of humor is easy to spot around the eyebrows, and so is self-deception. Add to your observation the set of the head on the neck, the carriage of the shoulders, the posture of the back, and you know a lot more.
These are the accumulated qualities of the soul, and they are expressed in life after life. By the time a person gets really old, the soul has worn in its body so completely that she probably looks almost exactly as she would if she had reached that age in one of her other lives. She need barely have bothered with the new body at all. Which isn’t to say that souls don’t change and evolve over time, because they do.
The first time you see a familiar person in a new body is a strange and even haunting sensation, but you get used to it. You start recognizing the telltale places where the soul asserts itself: the eyes, of course; the hands, the chin, the voice. The pathos is in how much of ourselves we hold out to any passing eye that takes an interest.
It was indeed haunting to see the woman in the market on the Bosporus. I ran toward her without thinking. I grasped the curtains with my grubby hands and yanked at them as I ran alongside. “I-I—I was—you were—I want—” I couldn’t think of how to convey our connection. “Do you remember me?” In a childlike way, I didn’t differentiate my experience from hers.
I don’t
At some point the servants turned a corner, the curtain rippled, I saw fingers, and then I saw a face peering out. I knew instantly and viscerally who she was. I might have gasped or made some noise, because she looked at me. The pose of her neck, her round, dark eyes staring out at me. It wasn’t the same face, exactly, but it was the same girl. Now she was older than I was, probably twenty-five at least.
I can’t tell you how I knew it was her. In the years since then I’ve gotten to be very good at recognizing souls from one life to the next. I find it puzzling myself, so it’s hard to explain how I do it. But I am not the only one who can. It’s not so different from the way you can know a person when she is twenty years old and recognize her again when she is eighty, though every cell in her body has changed in the meantime. There is almost nothing you could program a computer to do, by observation alone, that would allow it to recognize a person at such disparate ages. But we can do it. Animals can do it.
What is it we recognize? The soul is a mysterious thing. It’s no less mysterious for me, though I’ve seen my own and others’ refracted through hundreds of bodies over time.
One thing I can tell you from my unusual perspective is how powerfully our souls reveal themselves in our faces and bodies. Just sit on a train sometime and look at the people around you. Choose a person’s face and study it carefully. All the better if they are old and a stranger to you. Ask yourself what you know about that person, and if you open yourself to the information, you will find you know an overwhelming amount. We naturally guard ourselves from the obvious truths of strangers around us, so be warned. You can get overstimulated and uneasy if you really start to look. One of the skills of living is simplifying as you go, so when you let your guard down, the complexity is troubling. There are certain rare people you find—usually they are healers or poets or people who work with animals—who live their lives in this state, and I admire them and sympathize with them, but I am not like them anymore. I’ve done a lot of simplifying in my life.
As you look at this stranger’s face you will be able to guess pretty accurately at age, background, and social class. And as you look longer, if you let yourself see, the subtleties will clamor to show themselves. Doubts, compromises, and disappointments little and big—those usually reside around the eyes, but there are no rules. The hopes usually lurk around the mouth, but so do bitterness and tenacity. A sense of humor is easy to spot around the eyebrows, and so is self-deception. Add to your observation the set of the head on the neck, the carriage of the shoulders, the posture of the back, and you know a lot more.
These are the accumulated qualities of the soul, and they are expressed in life after life. By the time a person gets really old, the soul has worn in its body so completely that she probably looks almost exactly as she would if she had reached that age in one of her other lives. She need barely have bothered with the new body at all. Which isn’t to say that souls don’t change and evolve over time, because they do.
The first time you see a familiar person in a new body is a strange and even haunting sensation, but you get used to it. You start recognizing the telltale places where the soul asserts itself: the eyes, of course; the hands, the chin, the voice. The pathos is in how much of ourselves we hold out to any passing eye that takes an interest.
It was indeed haunting to see the woman in the market on the Bosporus. I ran toward her without thinking. I grasped the curtains with my grubby hands and yanked at them as I ran alongside. “I-I—I was—you were—I want—” I couldn’t think of how to convey our connection. “Do you remember me?” In a childlike way, I didn’t differentiate my experience from hers.
I don’t
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